Because the Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

one minute, down the next.”
    â€œWhat did you talk about?”
    â€œStuff. Shit. Books, mostly. My novel, the one I’ve been writing.”
    â€œDid you and Herzog discuss his assignments?”
    â€œWe never talked police work.”
    â€œI’ve heard Herzog described as a ‘stone loner.’ Is that accurate?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œCan you name any of his other friends?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWomen?”
    â€œHe had a girlfriend he saw occasionally. I don’t know her name.”
    Lloyd leaned closer to Bergen. “What about enemies? What about men within the Department who hated him for the way he stood by you? You know the rank-and-file cop mentality as well as I do. Herzog must have engendered resentment.”
    â€œThe only resentment that Jack engendered was in me. He was so much better than me at everything that I always loved him the most when I hated him the most. We were so, so different. When we talked last, Jack said that he was going to exonerate me. But I ran. I was guilty.”
    Bergen started to sob. Lloyd got up and walked to the door, looking back on the hack writer weeping underneath framed excoriations of what he had once been. Bergen was serving a life sentence with no means of atonement. Lloyd shuddered under the weight of the thought.
    The return trip to the Valley eased Lloyd’s fatigue. Snug in his air-conditioned cocoon, he let his mind run with images of Herzog and Bergen, intellectual cop buddies, two men who his instincts told him were as much alike as Bergen said they were different. The Freeway Liquor case receded temporarily to a back burner, and when he parked in front of Jack Herzog’s building he felt his mental second wind go physical. He smiled, knowing he would have the juice for a long stretch of hunting.
    Herzog’s neighbors began returning home from work shortly after five. Lloyd sized the first several of them up from his car, noting that their common denominator was the weary lower middle class look indigenous to Valley residents of both genders. Prime meat for the insurance payoff ploy. He pulled a stack of phony business cards from the glove compartment and practiced his glad-hander insurance man smile, preparing for a performance that would secure him the knowledge of just how much a loner Jungle Jack Herzog was.
    Three hours later, with two dozen impromptu interviews behind him, Lloyd felt Herzog move from loner to cipher. None of the people he had talked to recalled even seeing the resident of apartment 423, assuming that the unit was kept vacant for some reason. The obvious candor of their statements was like a kick in the teeth; the fact that several had mentioned that the landlord/manager would be out of town for another week was the finishing blow. It was a solid investigatory angle shot to hell.
    Lloyd drove to a pay phone and called Dutch Peltz. Dutch answered on the first ring. “Peltz, who’s this?”
    â€œAnyone ever tell you you answer the phone like a cop?”
    Dutch laughed. “Yeah, you. Got a pencil?”
    â€œShoot.”
    â€œHerzog was working two singles bars, the First Avenue West and Jackie D.’s, both on Highland north of the Boulevard. He was specifically looking for bartenders taking bribes to serve minors and hookers giving head in the hat-check room; we’d had a dozen complaints. He worked those joints for over six weeks, never blowing his cover, always calling narco or patrol from a pay phone when he saw something coming down. He figured in six coke busts and nine for prostitution. As a result, the A.B.C. has both joints up for suspension of their liquor licenses.”
    Lloyd whistled. “What about the reports he filed?”
    â€œNo reports, Lloyd. Walt Perkins’ orders. The arresting officers filed. Walt didn’t want Jack compromised.”
    â€œShit. That means you can scratch revenge as a motive.”
    â€œYeah, at least as far as